Vermont expat's novel goes inside the mind of the 'other' Mrs. Emerson
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By Tom Haley Staff Writer - Published: January 22, 2006
It was more than 40 years ago that Amy Belding wrote a passage in the Proctor High School student newspaper The Sutherland about a couple kissing under a street light, the snow dancing in all its beauty the way it does when you look up into the light.
Today she has written a similar description: "The snowflakes caught the light and for a moment it appeared to me as if a hundred tiny candles flickered over the water."
Only this time the couple is Lydia Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson. And the description is only a small slice of 325 pages of a historical novel that has sold well enough as a hardcover that the publisher, St. Martin's Press, is bringing it out in paperback in June.
"Mr. Emerson's Wife" also has raised a few eyebrows since its publication, for its bold imagining of an episode involving the title character and another literary lion.
The novel's author, now Amy Belding Brown, says the idea for the book was planted when she began an e-mail correspondence through a writers group with a man in California who was interested in Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Since he lived on the West Coast and she was living in Massachusetts, it was much easier for Brown to do the research.
She found it fascinating.
"After looking into it for a while, it really began to grab me," she says.
What intrigued her was that "Lidian" Emerson, as the writer called his second wife, seemed to get short shrift in the treatment of Emerson's history. His first wife, Ellen, was mentioned much more prominently even though they were married only 18 months before she died of tuberculosis.
"That puzzled me," Brown says.
She tells the story of Emerson, Thoreau and others in and around the Massachusetts communities of Concord and Plymouth through Lidian's eyes.
She also writes of a one-time affair between Lidian Emerson and Thoreau. Brown has no proof this happened but says that was part of the creative license in writing a novel.
A reviewer for Booklist calls it an "excellent, engaging story" and "a substantive page-turner" but laments the lack of a note delineating what is fact, conjecture and fiction in the book.
Brown says she took great care to preserve the flavor of that era and did not include anything that could not have happened.
"I came as close to the facts as I could, and that has frustrated some people. The Emersons were not pleased, although I haven't had a face-to-face confrontation with them. It hasn't raised a ruckus or anything like that. I don't think the Emersons are thrilled, but they haven't said anything to me."
The Emerson family still owns his home in Concord, Mass., which is operated as a museum, and Brown has discovered Thoreau has a large following. "The environmental movement took him in and sees him as their father," she says.
Brown thought about writing a nonfiction book on the subject, but it was her agent who steered her in the direction of a novel.
"She told me, 'You are a fiction writer. That's what you do.'"
Brown became passionate about the novel and had a manuscript of about 500 pages when she began a master's program in writing at Montpelier's Vermont College in 2000. Her instructor Brett Lott advised her to throw it away and start over.
Hearing those words was a little traumatic, but she says it turned out to be good advice.
The book centers on the Emerson household, a sort of experiment in communal living. It is in that setting that she weaves sexual tension between Lidian Emerson and Thoreau, perspectives on marriage and having babies, ideas on slavery and women struggling with the concept of independence.
The dedication in the book is to the author's father, Robert French Belding, an educator whose career took the family from the Saxtons River area — where he was teaching when Brown was born — to Montpelier, Poultney and Proctor. He was the principal at Proctor High School in the 1960s.
The dedication reads: He blessed me with the passion of intellect, the magic of story, the felicity of humor and the benediction of unconditional love.
"He was the storyteller in our family," Brown says. "When we had relatives visiting he would always tell a story. He was very nurturing and had a sense of humor."
When he left Proctor he became the assistant headmaster of St. Johnsbury Academy.
"The last time I saw him was when I got married. He walked me down the aisle. He died shortly after that. I did not know that he was as ill as he was," she says, recalling his death in 1969.
"The dedication is very important to me," she says. "He wasn't able to see me write the book that I was very proud of."
Brown now lives in Grafton, Mass., with her husband, Duane. They have four children — three out of college and one a junior at Wesleyan in Middletown, Conn.
She has a project in the works for which the setting is 1600 around the town where she lives.
"It's too early in the game to know when I will finish it or if I will finish it," Brown says.
She is an adjunct professor, teaching English composition at nearby Worcester State College.
"Teaching is something really new to me and something I like," she says.
Brown missed her recent 40th Proctor High School reunion, but it is possible that a book signing might bring her back to her childhood haunts.
She returned in the early 1990s when the Proctor Free Library had a signing for her romance novel "Island of Summer Love," which was set in Maine, where she graduated from Bates College.
The writing life has taken Brown to far-off places and different eras where she has met Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
But it is always exciting when it can take her back home.
Contact Tom Haley at tom.haley@rutlandherald.com.